I am sitting out on the windowsill of my mini-apartment as I write this. To my left the window is almost closed to keep out the flies, and to my right, night is falling on the square. The post apocalypse hasn’t set in yet as there is light left in the sky and I can see an open restaurant in the near corner. But there are much fewer people around than an hour ago, when there was a huge crowd gathered for a street entertainer.
When I woke up this morning I was feeling if anything a shade worse and it was very sore to swallow, and I decided there was no point in dulling my precious days in South America for the sake of a doctor’s fee. I went upstairs to where the hostel reception is and asked the girl there if she could help me. She told me that seeing a doctor would cost 50,000 persos – about USD100 – and I would be better off just going to a pharmacy.
That made sense to me, and I went back to my room. On the way I met the young lad from last night, who was on his way home, and we chatted a few minutes. I was roughly right on his age – he’s 21. He studied three years of English but has dropped out to study photography instead.
Once in my room I decided once again that I really needed to talk to a doctor, given the Peruvian antibiotics had also failed, so I went back up to the girl. Again she repeated the price, with the kind of look that suggested she could not believe there were people in the world who were willing to spend so much money on such frivolities. Then she tried to explain to me where there was a clinic but it involved getting multiple trains, so I thanked her and quietly checked the internet and Lonely Planet instead.
The end result was a taxi quite a long way from here along the river, in which I got to see more of the city. The clinic was in a prosperous area, surrounded by nice houses and buildings and well-tended streets. On the way we passed a place selling quad bikes among other things, and I discovered for future reference that there are even larger ans sportier-looking quads than the one I had in EI. Hmm.
The nice taxi man dropped me off at the door and I went in to find no-one spoke a word of English, and they kept talking to me in Spanish as if by some miracle of tongues I would suddenly understand what they were saying. Then a woman came out from behind the counter and led me through the building to where there was another, similar counter. An English-speaking woman was duly found and she asked me what was wrong, and I told her. All around me were people who were clearly properly sick, and I started to wonder if maybe I was in the wrong sort of place.
But they took my details and told me to wait until my name was called, and I sat and stared idly around. I could easily have been sitting somewhere in Spain, or somewhere in the US if they spoke Spanish there. People came and went with clipboards and white coats, the paraphernalia of busy importance. They called out James Flanagan in the end, with the pronunciation on the latter word creative enough that I missed the call entirely, but eventually we connected. I was taken to a back room and made to lie on a trolley while they attached a proper hospital-style nameband to my wrist. I again thought I was in the wrong place, but the nurse assured me I was not. She took my blood pressure and temperature and left, then a doctor came in. He spoke fluent English, and after more poking and prodding and listening to my chest he decided I have an infection, the previous antibiotic hadn’t cleared it, and he would prescribe me a new one. Once I had paid my bill I was free to go, and was delighted to be leaving.
I got another taxi back to Plaza de Armas, and between the two taxis and the prescription itself the whole adventure cost roughly 85,000 pesos. Possibly I can get some back off the travel insurance, but my hopes are not high. The best thing to do would be just don’t get sick.
On the south side of Plaza de Armas there is an arcade with lots of little shops selling fast lunches, and I had lunch there standing at one of the counters. At first glance I seemed to have ordered a giant dollop of guacamole, but on further examination there was a hot-dog under it. Thus braced I set out on the circuit of museums I had planned in the morning.
The first was the pre-Colombian musuem, and it was easily the best. There were examples of pottery and ceramic and statues of various purposes and designs from many of the civilisations that have risen and fallen in South America over the last seven thousand years. The descriptions were in English, and it was clear that for some of the statues no-one has any idea what they were for or what they symbolise. The museum gave a great sense of the complexity of it all, multiple peoples and belief systems mingling with each other. It made me very aware, as all good museums do, of how little I know. Even the names of the civilisations were mostly new to me.
From there I went to the National Museum on the main square, where almost nothing was in English, and I wasn’t able to puzzle out much of the Spanish. But it was a charming, rambling place, along the lines of the Smithsonian in Washington, with exhibits on all sorts of aspects of the country. There were coins and old uniforms, a 1950s black phone, swords, a revolver in a box, small cannon not even as big as my leg, rifles, model ships, pictures, furniture, a ship’s wheel and mast, a small steam engine, a chariot for a horse. There was a room with many example of the grills you see on the windows all over the place, lending weight to the guide’s story in Arequipa that the grills date from colonial times, and there was a 1973 copy of the Observer with headlines on the coup, though I found the rest of the page just an interesting as it was about the IRA. My murderous countrymen had released a statement to the effect they would continue to ‘strike’ wherever they ‘saw fit’ until the British withdrew from Ireland. The tone of the language seemed to me designed to inflame and aggrieve, rather than towards any purpose of resolution.
In the article on Chile it said of Allende that stories of his suicide were untrue, and that he had died ‘with his helmet on and a machine-gun in his hands.’ A resonant phrase. So overall the museum very enjoyable, even though I was missing an entire dimension of the experience by not speaking Spanish.
From there I went to the Gallery of Fine Arts, and I suspected in advance that I wouldn’t like it, and when I got there I found I didn’t like it. Well, I liked the space – a huge, high glass ceiling like a Victorian train station, a balcony encircling it about half way up, pillars in the form of classical statues. Taking up most of the floor space was what I initially thought to be detritus from a building site, but which turned out to be an exhibit. It was made mostly of what seemed abandoned wood, planks and pallets and sticks of it. There was a large platform, underneath which ‘shelves’ had been created in places, and the space between the shelf and the platform had been crammed with battered old clothes and bedding and an ancient football and things of that nature.
I am sure that it represented something, probably something profound, probably something I would care about it if someone would explain it to me. I know that this is about ideas, not necessarily execution. To me the clothes spoke of the downtrodden and the oppressed and the poor, and the wood of the forgotten, unseen, unwanted places, and I understand that my interpretation is as valid as anyone else’s. But I still wonder: what will future generations value of the art like this? Will they say of us, ‘What giants were they to have created such masterpieces of wood and clothes’? Maybe they will. But I find it hard to see it.
Somewhat dispirited, I trudged the hot kilometre or so to Pablo Neruda’s house. The sun was strong and there wasn’t much shade, and I didn’t have very high hopes. When I got there I could find the coffeehop and the bookshop but could not for the life of me figure out how to get in to the museum. I eventually asked someone. They explained you could only enter with a tour, at which point I recalled that I had read that in the guidebook not one hour previously. Happily there was a tour in twenty minutes. So I bought my ticket and waited in the coffee shop with a cappuccino and a slice of cake and read about Benjamin Franklin, and then they called all us non-Spanish-speaking morons together, and so began the single best tour I have ever been on, and one of the things I will remember about this trip for all of the years that I get hereafter.
The guide led us down some stairs and through a low door into a living area. There was a long table set for dinner with blue and white porcelain plates. The glasses were of bright red and blue and green, and didn’t seem to follow any pattern. On the walls were paintings, one of them of a watermelon. At the end of the room were two long, narrow doors. Over the doors were small dolls. The guide began to explain things to us, and he had the passion and energy and detailed knowledge of the genuine enthusiast. Neruda, he said, wrote poems that were exceptional enough to win him the Nobel Prize, but he was not a serious, aloof man like you might think a poet would be. He was an extrovert, a collector, a lover of company and people. He collected the glasses that we saw on the tables (I’m afraid you weren’t allowed take pictures in the house, or I would have hundreds) and he collected pictures with watermelon in them. He had written an ode to the watermelon.
There were no ropes or signs in the room, and standing there it seemed Neruda himself had only just left for a moment and would be back in a second. His presence jumped from the place, the presence of someone full of life and energy and fun. He had the house built to his own specifications and he wanted it designed like a ship. On the way in we had passed a small bar, and it was the bar from a boat. Some of the windows were round, like portals. We went upstairs to another room, and it was designed to be like a lighthouse. It even had a lamp in it shaped like a giant lightbulb of the sort you would find in a real lighthouse. And you had to go outside to get to the stairs going up – the overall house is built on a hill, but not all the sections directly connect with one another. When Neruda lived there, the lighthouse room would have looked directly out to the Andes in the distance, though a building blocks it now.
On the level above that again was where Neruda had had a bar with one wall entirely open to the outside, and a long bench with a table on front of it on a small courtyard, where there would have been a barbecue. It was harder to imagine the place without people than with a crowd, the presence of Neruda in the middle of it all, laughing and helping and talking. On the final level was the library. His Nobel Prize sat in a small glass case, and there was a metal copy of a hand. The model for the hand was Matisse, I think. Neruda collected things shaped like hands. And in the outdoor bar he had a pair of giant shoes, a meter long each. In another case in the library was a sponge like you would find in the sea painted blue by the artist who had invented that particular shade of blue, Yves Klein. It is apparently now worth four million dollars.
The house used to be full of paintings and gifts from the foremost painters and writers and thinkers of the day – there was a still a Picasso displayed in one of the rooms. But sadly, terribly, in the coup of 1973 the soldiers came and trashed the house, destroyed the art and burned the library. Masterpieces of immense value were lost – as the guide said, the finest art collection in Chile, and all of it given to Neruda for free. Neruda himself had been ill, and whether or not it was related to the gutting of his home – both here and in the other two houses he had – he died little more than a week later. In that time of slaughter, when it was unsafe to be outside, when the army specifically told the people to stay away from his funeral, 15,000 turned up and walked with his body.
In the bookshop, they had this book, but it cost USD40. As soon as I can though I will get it, and maybe I should have bought it there to support them, for they have given me one of the most magical experiences of my life. How alive he was, how vigorous and fun and interested in things and in love with his wife just radiates from everything in the house.
That was the highlight of the day, by a distance. I went from there to the big hill, which is very high and very steep, and I took the train-thing to the top of it. I have forgotten the name of the hill and the word for the train thing, unfortunately; I will try and dig them out later. From that height, Santiago stretched into the near distance to where it became lost in smog, and the Andes were dim shapes on the horizon.
I went looking for a cable car that is supposed to go from the top of the hill, and got talking to three people who told me that it hadn’t been working for two years. ‘The part to fix it is in France,’ a guy a little yonger than myself explained. I asked why they couldn’t bring it here. ‘It’s very expensive,’ he said. ‘Welcome to South America.’ I enjoyed our brief chat, I have to say, and he welcomed me again later on in a non-ironic way.
It was starting to get on in the evening, and I was watching the sun like a man in a vampire movie, so I headed towards home. I wanted to check out an English language bookshop, but when I got there it was closed. I had a look for somewhere to eat around the square, where the guidebook says there is nowhere, and there is nowhere. I ended up retracing my steps to a large degree and eating in a pizza place. I was the only person inside, but all the tables outside were full. Travelling alone means meals assume a rather utilitarian function, and I didn’t stay that long. It also means you don’t have a lot to do in the evening, and blog posts can ramble to ridiculous lengths.
I was back here safely before the dark hours, as you already know, though I have long since abandoned the windowsill. I am not yet quite sure what to do tomorrow – I have two days, which is an awkward amount of time, but I may make a break to get a little way out of the city. I will definitely get out of this hostel, which is getting on my nerves for no particular reason. But whatever happens, you’ll hear it here first.
